OUT OF CONTEXT BUT EASY TO ADMIRE William Finn, a gay songwriter with wit and warmth (and second only to Sondheim), writes story ballads and situational numbers that teach as much as touch. Like two of their titles, they’re all about “Change” and “Heart and Music.” In his Tony-winning Falsettos  (a merging of his March of…

CORKING UP OR SELLING OUT? Living up to its title billing, Lookingglass Theatre Company’s world premiere Thaddeus and Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure is a rampage down Memory Lane. Their 135-minute blast from the past evokes the glory days of broad burlesque and novelty acts, as well as literally darker doings. A guilty pleasure and an…

SO BEYOND BAD THAT YOU’LL BE TAPPED OUT Half-baked, heavy-handed, overlong, poorly plotted, wretchedly sung, scenically sterile, contrived and clichéd, witless and mindless, and minus any production value(s), Tapped: A Treasonous Musical Comedy is not a good night at the theater. I’d say it should not be reviewed’”but that might mean it could be seen–by…

THE LONE EAGLE VERSUS THE LONE WOLF 81 years ago, everything conspired to make the “trial of the century” engrossing entertainment. (Actually, it was the second trial of the century–after the Leopold and Loeb murder tribunal–but who’s counting?) There was the horror of the kidnapping and killing of the 20-month-old baby of American idols Charles…

LOVERLY The most insidiously satirical moment in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore comes when a lowly sailor and his captain must instantly switch places when we learn that the latter was born nobly and not nastily. (Nautical expertise be damned; birth will out!) Thanks to George Bernard Shaw’s brilliant book, the same subversion occurs throughout…

SUBVERSION, DISRUPTION’”AND PRETENSION Caught is just what Gertrude Stein said of Oakland: “When you get there, there’s no there there.” A series of metaphysical jokes played on the audience, this self-indulgent tripe purports and provokes where other shows present and persuade. It delivers layer upon layer of theatrical deception till it becomes The Play That…

CAPTIVATING VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF LOVE What a feat happens seven times a week in Steppenwolf’s upstairs theater! Usually critics tell you to take their words for what they saw–but this show must be seen to be believed. In only 75 minutes British playwright Nick Payne’s Constellations explores a myriad of possibilities between two…

A RECIPE FOR BETTER  THEATER It’s no accident that this bold play, the latest offering from Northwestern University professor Rebecca Gilman, happens in Wisconsin circa 1976. The story of a corporate takeover of a small-town cheese company, Gilman’s civic-minded drama doesn’t play out in the present. But the 40-year-old anger and displacement it depicts is thrust…

INTERROGATING AN AUDIENCE It’s the afterschool special from hell: The North Pool is that rare you-can-hear-a-pin-drop play. In a mere 80 minutes, playwright Rajiv Joseph shrewdly and sharply changes the terms and tones in a purportedly ordinary conference between a vice principal and a graduating senior. James Yost’s engrossing, entangling staging, a Midwest premiere from…